Anindya Datta
The traditional notion of ‘Community’ has gradually
become outdated in today’s contexts, and thus it needs to be redefined and
updated in order to meet the present challenge of our society. The traditional
community was often exclusive, inflexible, isolated and unchanging, monolithic,
and homogeneous. With such attributes the old and traditional community does
not satisfactorily explain at full length all the functions of present society.
Douglas Schuler (New Community
Networks,1997 ) states, “ a new community – one that is fundamentally devoted to
democratic problem solving – needs to be fashioned from the remnants of the old
“, and he emphasises on the role of computer network in strengthening organizations, providing local
information, and developing the bonds of civic life and conviviality that lead
to social capital. Thus, according to him the new form of interconnected
(wired) community with hardware and software resources surpasses the limit of time
and space ,and allows new forms of democratic discourse and participation.
Steven G. Jones in his book ‘Cybersociety’ endeavours to portray this "new forms of community"- or "social formations
in cyberspace" as the direct outcomes of Computer-Mediated-Communication
or CMC which runs through the Super Information Highway. Tracing the genesis of
this ‘new social formations he finds that “the
emergence of community from a complex set of social formations in a space
enacted by mediating technology”. This newly formed social space is popularly branded as ‘virtual
reality’ (VR) or ‘cyberspace’ (Gibson 1984; Benedikt 1991; Rheingold 1991,
1993).
The debate regarding whether the term, community,
can be applied in cyberspace have been persisting for long ,until Matthew Williams takes “the
stance arguing despite the lack of physicality, communities can be formed and
maintained in cyberspace”. (Quoted from Papers: Ethnography and Data Reuse: Issues of Context and
Hypertext ... Virtually Criminal: Crime, Deviance and Regulation Online)
It, however, took considerably a
long time (till early 90s) for CMC researchers to institute the claim that cyber-communities,
to be more specific, cybersocieties even exist (Benedikt 1991; Rheingold 1991,
1993; Reid 1991, 1995; Curtis 1992; MacKinnon 1992, 1996; Hauben 1993;
Heim 1993; Derry 1994; Jones 1995) only
after these researchers were able to establish cybersociety's fundamental
existence they might possibly begin to study in-depth the burgeoning
communities of which Jones speaks.
Culture
is that phrase which is intimately embraced by every community, because it is
the way of community life. Similarly every cyber-community has its own culture
– “cyberculture” - a culture endemic to online and offline communities.
Oxford English Dictionary made an
early attempt to record the usage of the term "cyberculture" in 1963, as
“the social conditions brought about by automation and computerization."
The American Heritage Dictionary widens the term “Cyberculture” which states,
"The culture arising from the use of computer networks, as for
communication, entertainment, work, and business". However, what both
the OED and the American Heritage Dictionary fail
to notice is that cyberculture is the culture within and among users of
computer networks. This cyberculture may be purely an online culture or it may
span over both virtual and physical worlds.
Thus
it is not just the culture that results from the use of networked PCs, but
culture that is directly mediated by the PCs through Social-Medias specifically
by newly developed Social Networking Sites (SNS). Such as FaceBook, Linkedin,
Twitter, MySpace, Web 2.0 etc. Online Communities are the electronically-enabled linkages of like-minded, but potentially
geographically disparate persons.
“Who we are
when we are online ?” (Jones ; CyberSociety, 1995 ; Virtual Culture ,1997).
Jones seeks answer of the above question through his orientation towards
commonality and the social relationship we seek to foster via internet. He
examines the emerging social formations on-line and determines whether they
provide some of the humanly attributes we desire off-line - “Friendship ,
commonality, interaction and public life to determine whether the moral ideals
we seek among one another, community, are realized online”.
Revival of
a great good place.
According
to Jones internet has dual potentialities. First it can recreate and rebuilt
community as we have once known it being a great good place (Oldenberg,
1991;Rheingold, 1993), second, it would not merely “get us altogether” it would
do so without much effort, since it would overcome space and time for us”
Thus, Jones believes that internet makes
community better integrated since it tends to free a community from the
constraints of space and time and encourages us to engage with fellow human
beings irrespective of geographical proximity and time. Through internet it is
possible to construct a community from communication, “ rather than inhabitance
and being , which do not guarantee communication”.
The
prophecy
Dates
back to 1968 Licklider and Tylor were perhaps the first among early cyber
theorists who had most interestingly predicted the carefree atmosphere of the
future online community as under :
“Life
will be happier for the online individual because the people with whom one
interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and
goals than by accidents of proximity ------------ communication will be more effective
and productive and therefore more enjoyable”.(P-31).
The prophecy comes to be true but the
question remains why do we want the community back in our lives again? Jones
tends to relate the answer with C.
Wright Mill’s (1956) critique of “Mass Man”, people sunk in their routines,
’who’ do not transcend, “even by discussion’, their lives”. The possible way
out as Mill suggested, is “the small scale discussion ---------- the chance for
the reasonable and leisurely and human interchange of opinion”.
The constraints of time and space thus make
people “unsocial” and “isolated”. Day by day they seem to sink deep into their
routine and are disentangled from the community. It may, however, be congenial
for them to maintain a strong relational tie if they find community within
their environment. Hence the solution we seek via internet, to the
fragmentation of life along the lines of time is to commune with each other”.
A Silent world of narratives
Does the online community
fulfil all the desires of human interaction? Can virtually it satisfy human
feelings ? even face to face ,verbal communication ? Answer if yes , how ? Because,
as Barlow suggests, it is a silent world --- where all conversations are typed
(though presently we have facilities of voice chat, video chat and conference).
To enter this world one forsakes both body and place and becomes a things of
word only (Ruskoff, 1994).
According to Jones
narratives, however, are not communities. They may be artifacts of community
and may represent a good portion of what communities do to maintain and
reproduce themselves over times and we may imagine ourselves to be a part of the
community based on our reading of a narrative.
“no longer do we,
as members of the group, belong to
community ,rather community belong to us. Our sense of community is not only
derived from our identification with the group, it is derived from our
understanding of the group identity.” Internet follows the same trend which
been initiated by the development of “Printing Press”, and it continues to
create, What Beniger (1987) termed as ,”Pseudo Communities” which are
maintained through the process of integration of differing groups by the means
of “mass integration” and “mass production”.
To certain extent
these narratives may act and feel like community, but they cannot be termed as
community since community depends on inhabitancy and the newer community formed
by narratives relies more on recognition than inhabitancy. It is the very recognition
of understanding that , first, there are others like us, and other know we
exist. Thus whatever community – virtual or real – may we want to construct we
must require “human occupancy, commitment, interaction and living among and
with others”.
“Communities are to
be distinguished, not by their falsity / genuineness”, Anderson noted in
Imagined Communities(P 6),” but by their style in which they are imagined”. The
on-line communities are thus conceived in two ways inimical to real
communities.”First, they thrive on the “meanwhile”, they are forged from the
sense that they exist, but we rarely directly apprehend them, and we see them
only out of the corner of our eye”. The online community is ,therefore, more an
imagined phenomena which does not possess much louder entity and hence it is
indirectly conceivable. We only apprehend their presence in our life that goes
along with the direction of virtuality.
Second “they are imagined as parallel, rather serial, groupings of people. This
is to say that they are not composed of people who are necessarily connected,
even by interest, but rather groupings of people headed in the same direction”.
The above collective of individuals may be compared with a bus of people
traversing with different motives or interests whose destinations and routes
are same but they do not know each other. Thus they are connected not necessarily
by their interests but rather by goals (though they are unconscious of other’s
goal/s) . The ‘net people’ thus read the same page or enter into the same
chat-room or browse the same site with being conscious about each other. Hence
“being online is a time to be alone and yet be with others” – Bennahum (1994, 23)
Ananda Mitra, in
his article ,”Virtual Commonality[1]”
wrote that “the term “ Internet” has
become a generic label that refers to the electronic system and space where
many people can present their ideas to produce a new computer “reality” which
is sum of the various options, ideas , practices and ideologies represented by
the texts “ . Though he admits the primacy of texts for the formation of online
community, he never ignores the fact that pictures videos and sounds are
increasingly becoming significant. Thus to him “internet information is
primarily textual, although increasingly there is a movement towards the use of
images and sound to supplement text based information. Ananda Mitra, like
Jones, acknowledges that the texts exchanged on the internet are the artifacts
which enable the online communities to hold together and make the communities
cohesive, and these are also the indicators of the direction in which community
is headed.
According to Prof.
Mitra much of our research efforts are directed towards understanding of the dyadic
interactions in arena of computer mediated communication, but we should now
move beyond the question of dyadic or small group interactions and explore the pattern
of interactions of community as a large collection of users of the internet.
The most important
component for the online community formation is individual identities. Such
identities within these online communities are shaped primarily by the way in
which the participants introduce themselves into the discourse. Consequently,
the question of authenticity is much vital to online interactions and texting. “The
question of authenticity is connected with the interpersonal / impersonal
debate in which the textual form of internet is criticised for lacking the
“touch” that traditional communities would share1 “ However , Rheingold (1993) strongly
disagreed with the fact that online community presupposes any physical
proximity ,and assumed that, as mentioned
earlier , “virtual communities” are free from the constraints of place and
space and able to “emerge as global communities separated only by time zone”. But
however strong the denial is, it is not to be ignored that the overwhelming textual
dependence of the internet is detrimental to the existence of online
communities. Thus excessive text dependency of online community leads to its
most interesting characteristics - ephemerality. Internet has always been an
ever shifting place where specific texts remain available for a limited period
of time. Resultantly the images created by these texts are non permanent in
nature. Therefore, to become a member of the community one must maintain the
element of the continuity, and access the boards and newsgroups on a regular
basis to follow the discourse. Thus “the image produced by the texts exchanged
in the electronic community is thus unstable and predicted upon prior
knowledge”
The capacity to produce texts and
becoming a part of discourse has often been considered to be the “Interactive”
nature of the internet. While some scholars have drawn similarities between the
interactive nature of online community and the “face-to-face” attribute of the
traditional community, “others have questioned the need to find the congruence
between face-to-face situations and electronic contexts” because face-to-face
situation should not be considered as “primary or standard”. This is
particularly true , according to Prof.
Mitra , in the case of building national image because one can hardly conceive
of constructing national image through face-to-face community building
attribute. Prof. Mitra believes that in the context of national image
production the electronic community needs to be compared with traditional media
of mass communication. Indeed the internet’s text based system provides the
“High Touch” that is lacking in the mass mediated situation , as well as
developing the Gemeinschaft associated
with face-to-face situation. To him the
key empowerment that the internet makes available across a much larger forum
than the face-to-face situation can provide. ”The user audience can much more
decisively determine how specific images will be produced at any moment either
by posting responses or by posting original texts to produce new image”
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